Feb
25
2009
Adding Value = Theft!
Roy Blount, president of the Authors’ Guild, writing in the New York Times, attempts to defend his groups assertion that the Amazon Kindle 2’s text-to-speech capability is cheating authors out of audio-book royalties:
“What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.”
And that assertion makes absolutely no sense. The creator of an item does not have a right to impose an arbitrary tax on anyone who adds value to the item. Otherwise we’d be open to all sorts of nonsensical scenarios, like:
The RIAA hits Apple with a lawsuit, claiming that the trippy visualizer component built into iTunes adds value to the music, and demands extra visual-performance royalties.
Movie studios take issue with the “up-scaling” feature built into current DVD players, which increases the resolution of the image to improve picture quality on HTDVs. They point out that the output resolution is comparable to Blu-Ray, making the consumers’ DVDs roughly twice as valuable, and demand the DVD manufacturers cut them a share of that.
The CEO of Exxon-Mobil asserts that his company has a right to a share of the extra value that the Prius adds to every gallon of gasoline. Prius owners are getting more mileage out of it, making the gas more valuable to them, so Toyota should be paying $1 a gallon in royalties to the oil companies.
International Paper Corp. demands a share of the extra value that book publishers are adding to the paper it produces by printing books out of it. “We sell them a ream of paper for a buck,” said a company spokesman, “and they put some ink on it and turn around and sell it as two hardback books for $25 each! All we’re asking for is our fair share, say 10% of that $24 markup.”
IPC’s gutsy move is being watched with interest by Universal Forest Products, which points out that its wood pulp is being used by paper manufactuers and resold at a higher price. It is seeking 10% of the “unconscionable, exploitative profit” that IPC and other paper companies make from the pulp they get from UFP.
In a hastily-arranged press conference, The Lorax—who speaks for the trees—demands massive overdue royalties from the forest products industry, the paper industry, book publishers, as well as Amazon and Apple. Analysts praise the bouncy meter and humorous rhyme scheme of the announcement…
February 25th, 2009 at 5:12 PM
I love your examples, but allow me to play the role of Solicitor for Asmodeus. If a piece of content is licensed for rendition in a particular medium, also presenting it in a different medium would be a violation of that license. If I pay the royalty to be able to perform Woody Allen’s classic play “God” in a theatrical production, then I couldn’t also produce and distribute a movie of the performance. However, I’d think that providing interpreters for the Deaf in the theater would be fair, and along the lines of your examples. I haven’t read Blount’s piece and don’t have enough background in the matter to know if this is an issue with licensing terms or some other douchebaggery.
February 25th, 2009 at 6:03 PM
Josh — Performance is a different matter than personal use. If someone used a Kindle to read a book out loud to an audience, I’d definitely agree that was infringing. But the guild’s complaint is about the ability to read it out loud even to yourself.
Moreover, they’re going after Amazon, not the user. This is like Woody Allen suing Canon because someone recorded the play with a camcorder.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:25 PM
Personal use is a pretty important point. But I think it’s all a stupid issue anyway. I love the recordings I have of Roger Zelazny reading his own works. I can’t imagine I’d be as satisfied with a text-to-speech rendition, or that having that would stop me from buying the audiobook.
February 25th, 2009 at 11:46 PM
I wonder if they plan to charge extra for children’s books that will be read to them by their parents?
February 26th, 2009 at 4:39 AM
I think the confusion comes because authors and publishers are used to being able to license audio books separately. I can certainly understand why they’re concerned about the ability of Kindle to read a book out loud, but realistically I think they have to accept that this isn’t the same thing as an audio book (for one thing, as good as modern speech synthesis is, it still can’t match the dulcet tones of the average voice artist).
Anyway, I think the comment from Roy Blount shows really that there has been a misunderstanding somewhere, and I think the subsequent furore that seems to have been kicked up all over the Internet is equally overblown in the other direction. In particular, the Internet hype surrounding this issue is damaging to all copyright owners, not just authors and publishers, and I think it needs to stop. At the same time, somebody clearly needs to sit down with the Authors’ Guild and actually talk to them about this. Perhaps that’s happening right now—we can only hope.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:23 AM
Josh— Yup, I agree completely; I just didn’t bring up that angle because it’s orthogonal to the copyright issue. Although I have to say the speech quality is really good: my office-mate got his K2 yesterday, and tried out the speech feature while I wasn’t paying attention, and I thought for a minute that he’d turned on a news-radio station.
(But having a book read by an emotionless anchorman/woman is clearly not the same as a good audio-book!)
February 26th, 2009 at 8:29 AM
alastair — There’s definitely confusion. What’s bothersome is that, in today’s climate, it gets expressed as an assertion of property rights.
The root of the problem seems to be a confusion between a right to make reproductions of a work (creating and selling an audio-book) versus the right of the end-user to transform the work for personal use (text-to-speech); coupled with a confusion between the end-user’s actions and a company’s creation of a device which enables those actions.
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:29 PM
Can’t help it…
…but the assignment in the title is driving me crazy.
How about, “Adding Value == Theft”?
Maybe I need to learn another family of languages?
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:40 PM
Eric — Heh! Actually I make that ‘==’ joke a lot, and decided that this time I’d give it a rest.
Or maybe it was just a Pascal flashback…